Are Personality Types In Science Cut Out For Contemporary Discourse?

This week a colleague sent me a private message saying that she was going to block a person on Twitter because he was being rather uncivil in his approach to her. It is unfortunate because I have noticed that some people are particularly aggressive towards my female counterparts on social media. Heck, I was even racially-harassed by scientists that disagreed with something I wrote about climate change. While that is awfully disheartening and frankly a bit pathetic, it is a topic for a different day, and the colleague that I spoke of can more than hold her own. Around the same time of this observation, I was being interviewed for a magazine. The writer remarked that I seemed to have the type of personality able to withstand conflict and allow for engagement in various platforms. In that moment, I thought about both situations. I am a scientist that is able to navigate the traditional grounds of the ivory tower but also engage in social media, host TV shows or podcasts, and have civil disagreement.

But in general, are personality types that typically go into science cut out for contemporary discourse? I want to explore this from the perspective of climate science.

Science and the public. Chicago Museum of Science and IndustryNOAA website

After completing my doctoral work in the 1990s at Florida State University, I was a research meteorologist and deputy project scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for 12 years. For the past 12 years, I have been a professor at a major University, and director of its Atmospheric Sciences program. Along the way, I also served as the president of the American Meteorological Society. I mention all of those things simply to establish that I have been around a lot of scientists in the past 25 years. My observations, though anecdotal, have been that many scientists tend to be rather introspective and uncomfortable engaging beyond the confines of the classroom, lab, or traditional academic spaces like conferences. I said "many" not all because there are certainly many that do go beyond the "ivory tower." Some colleagues even use that "new innovation" called social media. I am being a bit sarcastic there because I still hear some colleagues lament that they are uncomfortable using new stuff like Twitter.

I tweeted my thoughts on this topic, and my colleague Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a noted climate scientist and professor at Texas Tech, responded that the peer review literature actually offers some support for my observations. Professor Hayhoe engages well beyond the ivory tower on climate change and is quite effective. The 2012 article that she referenced was published in the journal Climatic Change. The paper discusses something called the Jungian personality type, which is one of multiple ways that people process or take in information. If the Jungian personality type is "science jargon" to you just think about personality testing such as the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator (MBTI). MBTI is all of that Extravort, Introvert, Sensing, Intuition, Thinking, Feeling, Judging, and Perceiving "stuff."

I know, I know.....you are not of fan of these canned personality tests. I have probably even eye-rolled at them myself (even though it does capture me fairly well for the most part). Many psychologists and scientists sneer at it too. I will forgo that debate because my colleague Professor John Knox at the University of Georgia makes a key point in a message to me,

whatever it is that MBTI measures, there sure is a BIG difference between climate types and the public....it's detecting some kind of statistically highly significant difference.

The aforementioned paper by Weiler and colleagues is no exception. It finds that Ph.D climate researchers were more associated with "Intuition," the "big picture," and focus on theories whereas the broader U.S. population was more likely to focus on "Sensing," concrete examples and experience. This is certainly something that I have observed and have troves of observations of people using incorrect examples or experiences to draw conclusions about climate change. For example, a woman recently told me that climate change was fake because she camped out the previous night, and it was cold. The study surprisingly did not find much difference between extroversion and introversion between the two groups. This finding suggests communication styles of the two groups may be a barrier to exchange of science information.

Marshall Shepherd

This brings me back to contemporary science discourse. We are in an era of misinformation campaigns, attacks on "expertise", perceptions that a Tweet or Wiki search carries as much weight as published science, and aggression in social media. If my anecdotal observations and findings in the aforementioned study (and others) are robust, it is quite understandable why some scientists may choose not to engage or feel uncomfortable doing so.

The study does suggests that scientists might explore way to use concrete, simple examples or stories to build up to the "big picture" they are more comfortable with. The authors also suggest scientists should talk with reporters or the public during the process of the research and not just at the "results" stage. Conveying areas of uncertainty is important because the public is more likely to see "doubt" in science in a finding while scientists tend to move on to the next step in the scientific method or process.

Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd, a leading international expert in weather and climate, was the 2013 President of American Meteorological Society (AMS) and is Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program. Dr. Shepherd is the Georgia Athletic Associati...